New Lore System
Moving away from the old wiki

Hey everyone,

Our old wiki, which used MediaWiki was really broken. We have spent a while exporting all the content from it, and importing it into a system that is managed by the MOO. This new system comes with a set of tools that allow admin and approved players to easily add & edit lore content from within the MOO. That lore content will then be available on the lore pages.

As part of this new system we are rolling out new content guidelines for the lore pages. These content guidelines basically mean that we are no longer going to have hyper specific content in the lore pages. So, no more page for 'Seven Ecks' or 'Gerik Phillips'. No more page that lists every single cyberware (and gets out of date and never gets updated). It's for evergreen style content that isn't going to need to be updated all the time. It's for well known world lore. Well known places. Well known events and corporations and factions.

We've gone through all the lore pages and:

- deleted ones that didn't fit out content guidelines

- updated all of the ones that remained

- fixed all broken links

- added some new pages

There is still a lot of work to do, and this is only the first step. Organizing a massive content writing effort isn't super easy, so it will take time. And you, if you desire, can help. If you're interested in helping write some lore content you can submit a service request and ask to be made a lore editor.

Player lore editors can submit content to be reviewed by the admin and then approved or disapproved. If approved it will be added to the site/replace existing content.

You can read more about this in 'help lore'.

As of right now, the trimmed down lore pages are live. There is an auto updating General Index that has a list of every lore page. As of right now there should be no dead links, as I've scanned for them, but it's possible I missed some.

Some of these pages are pretty sparse, and may remain that way, while others will be further fleshed out over time, and new pages will be added as makes sense. Again, this is just phase 1 of the effort.

We're open to feedback about the system and the type of content you'd like to see. Please keep in mind however, this is NOT a replacement for the Grid, or learning things ICly. It's for general knowledge stuff.

The Immy Holograms are NOT updated and are still using the old system. That's something we'll update soon enough.

Thanks to Johnny who coded the majority of this system.

(Edited by Slither at 4:25 pm on 1/15/2023)

So, in reviewing the lore pages we had, they were all terribly out of date. There were lists of products that hadn't been updated in years and were just plain wrong. I don't want to create a content rot nightmare by including a bunch of content about items that change and evolve over time. As the lore content will get stale, and misinformation will persist because we forget to update it. Maybe we will look at some of the items, like 'drugs' and say, this is pretty static, and decide to have a lore page for it. Or maybe we end up with a really great player content editing flow and this ends up not being a concern and we can loosen our guidelines.

At this point though, we're starting restrictive and we can loosen up as time goes on.

Juicy Vee is a world famous superstar, and the Prophet Anor is the prophet or the most popular religion on the planet.

Drugs have changed dramatically in the past 5 years. And the info about them was really out of date. We have IC mechanisms for providing information about drugs now, such as experience scripts :)

I think I've already explained my reasons. It sounds like you just don't agree. That's OK. But I don't think there is any arguing that having correct and updated information is a good thing. As I mentioned in my previous post, we may consider loosening the reigns if we aren't finding it overly painful to maintain the content we have + the content we plan to add. I've spent the last 5 days and ~40 hours pruning the content, updating it, fixing broken links, etc. And several other admin have spent a number of hours on it as well. It's extremely time consuming.

So, like I said, until we know we are going to be able to keep the pages up to date with our current content guidelines, I don't think it is a good idea to include non-evergreen content that will need to be updated as new items are added to game / changes are made to functionality.

There are a multitude of world-famous or galactically famous individuals that are not granted such entries but are brought up on TV, Sic chatter, the Grid and so on.

I feel deeply passionate about this community so of course I disagree, I believe it is harmful to move to a place where more slice-of-life world-building information is made harder to access. But I like to think I am not the only individual who does not, given comments made by other players during player-driven ooc discussions about the game.

Perhaps it can be put to a community vote if the community is found wanting and you are worried about the workload I will put my money where my mouth is and I will curate the lore files upon pharmacy and cyberware in the world, with controlled but privileged access to limited data on these game objects. Otherwise I will just shut up and move on.

I'm not going to say further regardless.

You could always write up some documents about cyberware and pharmaceuticals and publish them somewhere easily accessible IC?

Slither, will there be the opportunity to update the Timeline with some recent, world-important events such as the death of the Chief Justice and the assassination of Anor?

We've got four peeps on the player side who have been making updates to content and adding new pages. Really appreciate the hard work so far.

Haven't had many more submissions or edits in the past few months. Need some new people to help write and edit. Put a service request in if you're interested in joining the more writers!

Done.